Anne, exhausted from weeping, stunned and frightened by what she was hearing, made some feeble attempts to check this torrent of delight. She heard, with terror and a sense of being engulfed, that Richard Latham’s life was in her hands. It came upon her with overpowering force that if this were so clear to these sharp old eyes, there was no alternative before her but to marry him and do her best. She also heard with a numb ache that bewildered her that Kit was to marry Helen Abercrombie, who was so far removed from his simple kindliness, his goodness, his warmth of heart. This secret was for Anne to keep!
How strange a day of endings and beginnings!
Patiently Anne submitted to being kissed by Miss Carrington. She fancied there was an infusion of a salute to the bride in the embrace. Slowly she went back to her boarding place, weary in brain and body.
CHAPTER XI
Penitential
IF a Roman general ever went out certain of conquest and returned defrauded of his triumph to be chained to the wheels of a chariot and dragged through the city in disgrace, instead of gloriously striding that chariot, then that general and Peter Berkley the Second would have understood each other’s bitterness.
Little Anne’s heart sank lower when she heard the outer door slam, though by the time that she had reached home and had waited, dreading to hear Peter’s step, it was already sufficiently despairing. To make matters worse, Mrs. Berkley had gone to lunch with Joan, leaving Bibiana, Anne’s former nurse, now serving as waitress, to see that the children were comfortable. Children, indeed! Peter was a ruined man. He came into the house with a tragic stride, gloom upon his brow, but in spite of his mature sense of catastrophe—he demanded his mother instantly as Anne might have done, while he threw his books and hat in different directions and himself into a chair, like Napoleon after Waterloo.
Little Anne rose from a dark corner looking white and small. She was trembling, but she did what was required of her, albeit her voice was faint and it quavered.
“Mother went to Joan’s, Peter. I’m sorry, Peter-two,” she said.
“So am I. I’d like to talk to her,” growled Peter. “But of course she’d go when I need her so bad.”